The Devil's Advocate

Chapter 5

"So what now?" Arcee asked, folding her legs together close to her body while Starscream kept himself propped up with a table at his back, almost sitting on the surface.

"It will take a few solar cycles at least for my internals to fully heal, but we don't have any time to waste. A breem or two should be enough to allow the new cog to settle," he said weakly, still clenching his denta as the shock of surgery had yet to fade. His claws rubbed over the left side of his abdominal cables, as if he could feel his new cog nestled underneath. "Assuming you even put it in correctly," he added in a skeptical mutter.

"Y'know, it would have been easier if you'd taken these damn shackles off beforehand," Arcee pointed out, shaking one of her bulky wrists at him.

Starscream just snorted at her, somehow making her feel inferior even when he looked five klicks away from going into stasis lock. "Easier for you to slip away, you mean. You managed it, anyway. Even with the spark incident..." His wings drooped as a tremor must have shook through them. "Usually whenever there's an operation near the chamber, the medic has to run an electric current through their digits, depending on whether they're operating on a mech or femme. It keeps the spark repelled from their hands."

That made enough sense to Arcee- the magnetic field of femme sparks were positively charged while mechs were negative. The rule of opposites attracting were what made bonding two sparks together possible.

But Starscream wasn't done speaking. "On the subject of sparks... you're bond-born, aren't you?"

Arcee tensed, intakes hissing and backstrut snapping straight. It was hardly a malicious observation, but that didn't mean she was comfortable with it. "How can you tell?" She couldn't tell if she managed to keep her voice steady and free of snarls, as Starscream's expression refused to budge under the veil of superiority that somehow remained permanently fixed over it.

"Your winglets," he answered, with a nod toward the rigid flares from her back. "Bots only get them from having a Seeker parent-"

"And Seekers can't be made from the Well," she finished, as her body relaxed as much as it could while placed opposite a murderer. "That means you're bond-born as well."

Starscream nodded once, a proud flick of his helm. "Both my sire and carrier were of noble castes- Windscythe and Cloudchaser. He was Winglord of Vos, she was a lower noble in the Iacon Council. Through them it wasn't hard to gain the position of Senator by my fiftieth sparkday." He shrugged, as if it really was as easy as he put out, and Arcee had spent so long used to Earth time that she almost forgot five decades on Golden Age Cybertron was only like five years to humans. "What about you, two-wheeler? Sire was a cleaning drone and carrier a Praxian escort who fell hopelessly in love with each other?"

Again Arcee's intakes were thin and whistling, and her digits scraped together as they formed a pair of fists. She had to stop imagining slamming his denta into the edges of his cursed smirk before she could speak. "...Actually, my carrier was a prostitute. In Vos."

That revelation made him falter so spectacularly that she almost laughed at how quickly his wings fluttered, like a startled hummingbird's fighting against a hurricane. "Oh... I-uh..."

"Not only that, but my sire was some Seeker, probably noble, who didn't bother to use his firewalls," she added in the midst of his unprepared stuttering.

He managed to silence his vocaliser, growling softly instead. "I see."

Arcee wasn't sure what he was thinking of her behind that steel mask, blank as a drone's, and she was eager to stop his growling before it started ringing in her audios. "So why the sudden sharing mood, Starscream?" She hadn't expected to learn so much about her kidnapper, but maybe the surgery affected more than just his spark. And everything she learnt was something the Autobots could use against him when the time came.